Geography

Northern Ireland is composed of 26 districts, derived from the boroughs
of Belfast and Londonderry and the counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down,
Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone. Together they are commonly called
Ulster, though the territory does not include the entire ancient province
of Ulster. It is slightly larger than Connecticut.

Government

Northern Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom, but under
the terms of the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, it had a
semiautonomous government. In 1972, however, after three years of
sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics that resulted in more
than 400 dead and thousands injured, Britain suspended the Ulster
parliament. The Ulster counties were governed directly from London after
an attempt to return certain powers to an elected assembly in Belfast.

As a result of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, a new coalition
government was formed on Dec. 2, 1999, with the British government
formally transferring governing power to the Northern Irish parliament.
David Trimble, Protestant leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and
winner of the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize, became first minister. The
government has been suspended four times since then; it has remained
suspended since Oct. 14, 2002.

History

Ulster was part of Catholic Ireland until the reign of Elizabeth I
(1558–1603) when, after suppressing three Irish rebellions, the
Crown confiscated lands in Ireland and settled the Scots Presbyterians in
Ulster. Another rebellion in 1641–1651, brutally crushed by Oliver
Cromwell, resulted in the settlement of Anglican Englishmen in Ulster.
Subsequent political policy favoring Protestants and disadvantaging
Catholics encouraged further Protestant settlement in Northern
Ireland.

Northern Ireland did not separate from the South until William
Gladstone presented, in 1886, his proposal for home rule in Ireland. The
Protestants in the North feared domination by the Catholic majority.
Industry, moreover, was concentrated in the North and dependent on the
British market. When World War I began, civil war threatened between the
regions. Northern Ireland, however, did not become a political entity
until the six counties accepted the Home Rule Bill of 1920. This set up a
semiautonomous parliament in Belfast and a Crown-appointed governor
advised by a cabinet of the prime minister and 8 ministers, as well as a
12-member representation in the House of Commons in London.

Hostilities Between Catholic and Protestant Communities Mount

When the Republic of Ireland gained sovereignty in 1922, relations
improved between North and South, although the Irish Republican Army
(IRA), outlawed in recent years, continued the struggle to end the
partition of Ireland. In 1966–1969, rioting and street fighting
between Protestants and Catholics occurred in Londonderry, fomented by
extremist nationalist Protestants, who feared the Catholics might attain a
local majority, and by Catholics demonstrating for civil rights. These
confrontations became known as “the Troubles.”

The religious communities, Catholic and Protestant, became hostile
armed camps. British troops were brought in to separate them but
themselves became a target of Catholics, particularly by the IRA, which by
this time had turned into a full-fledged terrorist movement. The goal of
the IRA was to eject the British and unify Northern Ireland with the Irish
Republic to the south. The Protestants remained tenaciously loyal to the
United Kingdom, and various Protestant terrorist organizations pursued the
Unionist cause through violence. Various attempts at representational
government and power-sharing foundered during the 1970s, and both sides
were further polarized. Direct rule from London and the presence of
British troops failed to stop the violence.

Steps Toward Peace

In Oct. 1977, the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Mairead
Corrigan and Betty Williams, founders of the Community of Peace People, a
nonsectarian organization dedicated to creating peace in Northern Ireland.
Intermittent violence continued, however, and on Aug. 27, 1979, an IRA
bomb killed Lord Mountbatten as he was sailing off southern Ireland. This
incident heightened tensions. Catholic protests over the death of IRA
hunger striker Bobby Sands in 1981 fueled more violence. Riots, sniper
fire, and terrorist attacks killed more than 3,200 people between 1969 and
1998. Among the attempts at reconciliation undertaken during the 1980s was
the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985), which, to the dismay of Unionists,
marked the first time the Republic of Ireland had been given an official
consultative role in the affairs of the province.

In 1997, Northern Ireland made a significant step in the direction of
stemming sectarian strife. The first formal peace talks began on Oct. 6
with representatives of eight major Northern Irish political parties
participating, a feat that in itself required three years of negotiations.
Two smaller Protestant parties, including extremist Ian Paisley's
Democratic Unionists, boycotted the talks. For the first time, Sinn Fein,
the political wing of the IRA, won two seats in the British parliament,
which went to Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams and his second-in-command,
Martin McGuinness. Although the election strengthened the IRA's political
legitimacy, it was the IRA's resumption of the 17-month cease-fire, which
had collapsed in Feb. 1996, that gained them a place at the negotiating
table.

A landmark settlement, the Good Friday Agreement of April 10, 1998,
came after 19 months of intensive negotiations. The accord called for
Protestants to share political power with the minority Catholics, and it
gave the Republic of Ireland a voice in Northern Irish affairs. In turn,
Catholics were to suspend the goal of a united Ireland—a territorial
claim that was the raison d'être of the IRA and was written into the
Irish Republic's constitution—unless the largely Protestant North
voted in favor of such an arrangement, an unlikely occurrence.

The resounding commitment to the settlement was demonstrated in a dual
referendum on May 22, 1998: the North approved the accord by a vote of 71%
to 29%, and in the Irish Republic 94% favored it. In October, the Nobel
Peace Prize was awarded to John Hume and David Trimble, leaders of the
largest Catholic and Protestant political parties, an incentive for all
sides to ensure that this time the peace would last.

A New Coalition Government

In Dec. 1998 the rival Northern Ireland politicians agreed on the
organization and contents of the new coalition government, but in June
1999, the peace process again hit an impasse when the IRA refused to disarm
prior to the Assembly of Northern Ireland's new provincial cabinet. Sinn
Fein insisted that the IRA would only begin giving up its illegal weapons
after the formation of the new government; Unionists demanded disarmament
first. As a result, the Ulster Unionists boycotted the Assembly session
that would have nominated the cabinet to run the new coalition government.
The nascent Northern Irish government was stillborn in July 1999.

Subsequent talks on the agreement, which would have ended three decades
of direct rule from London, seemed to go nowhere. Finally, at the end of
November, David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionists, abandoned the
seemingly sacrosanct “no guns, no government” position and
took a difficult leap of faith in agreeing to form a government prior to
Sinn Fein's disarmament. If the IRA did not begin the destruction of their
weapons by Jan. 31, 2000, however, the Ulster Unionists threatened to
withdraw from the Northern Irish parliament, shutting down the new
government. With the compromise in place, this government was quickly
formed, and on Dec. 2, 1999, the British government formally transferred
governing power to the Northern Irish parliament. David Trimble became
first minister. Two leaders of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams and Martin
McGuinness, received seats in the 4-party 12-member parliament. But by the
deadline, Sinn Fein had made little progress toward disarmament. As a
result, the British government suspended parliament on Feb. 12, 2000, and
once again imposed direct rule. In July 2001, after issuing one last
ultimatum to the IRA to begin destroying its weapons stores, Ulster
Unionist leader Trimble resigned his post as first minister.

Following Trimble's departure, the IRA offered another vague and
open-ended disarmament plan, only to withdraw it. But on Oct. 23, days
before Britain was to suspend the Assembly, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams
dramatically announced that the IRA had indeed begun disarming. As a
result, Trimble was reelected as first minister.

On April 8, 2002, international weapons inspectors announced that the
IRA had put more stockpiled munitions “beyond use,” the
euphemistic phrase applied to disarmament in the negotiations. British and
Irish leaders hoped that Protestant paramilitary groups would also begin
to surrender their weapons. The Council on Foreign Relations has estimated
that Protestant paramilitary groups have been responsible for 30% of the
civilian deaths in the Northern Irish conflict. The two main Protestant
vigilante groups are the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster
Defence Association (UDA). Strongest during the 1970s, their ranks have
since diminished. While Protestant paramilitaries have observed a
cease-fire since the IRA declared one, none of these groups have made any
moves toward surrendering their weapons as stipulated by the Good Friday
Agreement.

Britain Resumes Direct Rule Of Northern Ireland

On Oct. 14, the British government again assumed direct rule of
Northern Ireland, after the Unionists threatened to quit the Assembly in
protest of suspected spying activity by the IRA. In March and April 2003,
negotiations were again under way to reinstate the Northern Ireland
Assembly. But Sinn Fein's vague language, weakly pledging that its
“strategies and disciplines will not be inconsistent with the Good
Friday Agreement,” caused Tony Blair to challenge Sinn Fein once and
for all to make a clear, unambiguous pledge to renounce using the
paramilitary for political means. According to the New York Times
(April 24, 2003), “virtually every newspaper in Britain and
Ireland has editorialized in favor of full disarmament, and the Irish
government, traditionally sympathetic to Sinn Fein, is almost as adamant
about the matter as London is.”

In Nov. 2003 legislative elections, the Ulster Unionists and other
moderates lost out to Northern Ireland's extremist parties: Ian Paisley's
Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein. Power sharing between these
antithetical parties was out of the question.

A $50 million bank robbery in Dec. 2004 was linked to the IRA, and Sinn
Fein's legitimacy as a political organization suffered a severe setback.
The brutal murder in Jan. 2005 of Belfast Catholic Robert McCartney by the
IRA, and the campaign by his five sisters to hold the IRA accountable,
further tarnished the IRA's standing, even in Catholic communities that
had once been IRA strongholds.

On July 28, 2005, the IRA announced that it was entering a new era in
which it would unequivocally relinquish violence, give up its arms, and
pursue its aims exclusively through political means. In late September,
the Irish Republican Army made good on its promise to give up all its
weapons, and their disarmament was verified by an international mediator.
Some Protestant groups, however, continued to doubt the veracity of the
IRA's claims. In Feb. 2006, the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC), a
watchdog agency monitoring Northern Irish paramilitary groups, reported
that although the IRA “seems to be moving in the right
direction,” dissident republican paramilitaries are still engaged in
violence and crime. On May 15, Northern Ireland's political parties were
given six months (to Nov. 24) to come up with a power-sharing government
or else sovereignty would revert indefinitely to the British
government.

An Agreement for a Power-Sharing Government

Shortly after parliamentary elections in March 2007, Gerry Adams, the
leader of Sinn Fein, and Rev. Ian Paisley, the head of the Democratic
Unionist Party, met face to face for the first time and hashed out an
agreement for a power-sharing government. The historic deal was put into
place in May, when Paisley and McGuinness were sworn in as leader and
deputy leader, respectively, of the Northern Ireland executive government,
thus ending direct rule from London.

On Feb. 5, 2010, with the signing of the Hillsborough Castle Agreement, Gordon Brown of Britain and Brian Cowen, prime ministers of England and Ireland, respectivly, created a breakthrough in the Northern Ireland peace process. According to the terms of the accord, Britain will hand over control of the six counties' police and justice system to Northern Ireland. The shift to local control of the courts, prosecution system, and police has been the most important and contentious of the issues plaguing the tenuous power-sharing government. The final phase of devolution was completed on April 12, when the policing and justice powers of Northern Ireland were transferred from Westminster to the Northern Ireland Assemby and the government created a Department for Justice for Northern Ireland.

In June 2010, Lord Saville, a High Court judge, released the results of his much-anticipated, 12-year investigation into the 1972 killing of 13 protesters by British paratroopers at a Catholic civil-rights demonstration in Londonderry. He determined that none of the victims posed a threat to troops and that the killings were unjustified. David Cameron, the British prime minister, apologised for"Bloody Sunday" on behalf of the government.

Belfast Riots Injure 32 Police Officers

On July 13, 2013, riots broke out due to a blocked march and at least 32 police officers, one lawmaker and eight rioters were wounded. Chief Constable Matt Baggott, Northern Ireland's police commander, blamed the Orange Order brotherhood leaders for the riots. In a statement, Baggott said, "Having called thousands of people to protest, they had no plan and no control."

Every year, the Orange Order brotherhood's annual July 12 march increases tension with the Irish Catholic minority. In recent years, Ardoyne, a Catholic district in northern Belfast has seen violence after the Orange Order brotherhood passed through with their march. Irish republican militants have attacked police after the parade in that area for the last four years. However, in 2013, hundreds of police reinforcements from Britain were deployed. British authorities ordered the Orange Order brotherhood not to march down a road near Ardoyne. The police blocked the road with armored vehicles. The Orange Order responded by having thousands of supporters come to that road in protest. The rioters attacked the vehicles, injuring the police officers in the process.

Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein and currently a member of the Irish Parliament, was arrested, imprisoned, and questioned for four days in May 2014 by police in Northern Ireland about the 1972 Belfast murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was falsely accused by the IRA of being an informer. His arrest followed the release of audiotapes of IRA members, now dead, connecting Adams to the brutal murder. Adams was released without being charged. He and his supporters claimed the arrest was a politically motivated attempt to tarnish his and Sinn Fein's reputation in lead-up to elections.